A San Francisco startup’s AI interviewing service has gone TikTok viral after a Ohio college student posted a clip of the “interviewer” experiencing a glitch where it repeated the phrase “Vertical bar Pilates” nonstop for nearly 30 seconds.
“I was creeped out,” Kendiana Colin told Gazetteer SF. “I was, like, eugh. I hate seeing things glitch.”
Colin, a 20-year-old Ohio State student, was interviewing for a part-time front desk position at a nearby location of StretchLab, a fitness studio chain. She was confused when the human reviewing her job application said she would be screened by an AI interviewer but took it in stride. (A representative for StretchLab didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
“This is 2025, like, why not?” Colin recalled thinking at the time. “I need a job.”
Last Thursday,Colin took the call with the AI “interviewer,” named Alex. An AI interview automator created by the San Francisco-based startup Apriora, Alex is pitched on the company’s site as “a better way to interview.” Apriora announced a $2.8 million seed funding round last May, and was part of Y Combinator’s winter 2024 cohort.
@its_ken04 It was genuinely so creepy and weird. Please stop trying to be lazy and have AI try to do YOUR JOB!!! It gave me the creeps so bad #fyp
♬ original sound - Its Ken 🤍
During the interview, Alex laughed, and took breaths in between questions. That was already odd, Colin said. Then, at some point in the interview, it started to glitch, reciting the phrase “Vertical bar Pilates” a handful of times before it paused.
“I'm going to assume that you're asking me about Pilates,” Colin recalled responding. “I was like, ‘um, I’ve never done Pilates before, but I have played sports in high school, if that helps.’”
Alex apologized, then clarified, saying it meant to ask about her availability for the job. Colin responded, to which the AI service started to say, “Great,” before it cut itself off to repeat the phrase “Vertical bar Pilates.”
Colin started to record. In the video, “Alex” recites the phrase “Vertical bar Pilates” for the entire duration of the video. A live transcript on the side has the phrase “Pilates|” typed out multiple times, in addition to the incomplete “Great” and another sentence that ended with “so much for.”
“It was like she was going through a tongue twister,” she said. “It was really creepy.”
Colin posted the TikTok Friday after some urging by her mother, who found the whole incident very funny. By Monday, the TikTok had racked up nearly two million views. Hundreds of comments were posted by HR workers talking about the spread of AI interviewers, job hunters who had also undergone AI screenings, and, perhaps most damningly, people who, like her mother, thought the AI screener was a joke. (“okay, but have you considered vertical bar pilates?” goes one top comment.)
“It's really sad that they decided, ‘Oh, you're not even worthy enough to be interviewed by a human.’ A human could have done this and we would have never even been here,” Colin said, before joking, “I could have just had a job by now.”
Aaron Wang, the CEO and co-founder of Apriora, did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment from Gazetteer.
